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New York City restaurant offers something new: Silence

The silent-dining experience fits with other attention-getting shticks restaurant owners and chefs often resort to

Patrons dine in silence at a restaurant called "Eat," in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (Ted Shaffrey / AP)

Fri., Oct. 11, 2013

NEW YORK — Quiet, please. Your dinner will now be served.

That’s the message being sent to customers at a New York City restaurant that prohibits any talking during an occasionally put-on $40 prix fixe, four-course meal.

Nicholas Nauman, head chef at Eat in Brooklyn’s trendy Greenpoint neighbourhood, said he was inspired to pitch the tight-lipped consumption sessions after spending time in India, where Buddhist monks take their breakfast without exchanging words.

“It’s just an opportunity to enjoy food in a way you might not have otherwise,” said the chef, noting that the sounds of forks on dishes and cooks in the kitchen provide some background noise to the experience. “There’s such a strong energy in the room.”

The silent-dining experience, experts said, seems to fit with other attention-getting shticks that many restaurant owners and chefs often resort to in the notoriously competitive restaurant business.

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At Moto, in Chicago, diners can eat the menu. In Paris, London, Barcelona and Moscow restaurant-goers at Dans le Noir? — French for “In the Dark?” — are served in the pitch-dark. (In Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver they do this at O. Noir). And pop-up restaurants — where one chef takes over another’s restaurant for the night — have long been the rage.

“As a mother of two 15-year-old boys it is kind of a fantasy to go do that,” Tanya Steel, editor-in-chief of Epicurious.com, said of the silent-dining experience at Eat. “But as someone who pays money to go out, I would feel like I’m in some kind of silent film; it would be incredibly difficult.”

At a recent evening at Eat, restaurant-goers didn’t seem to mind the silent treatment as they noshed on salads and sipped their soups.

One polite customer walked out the door to sneeze in order to avoid breaking the silence. Another could barely hold back a strong case of the giggles. And one couple found ways to communicate with facial expressions, instead of words.

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